The dramatic high point of Christopher Nolan’s version of The Odyssey comes when, after 20 years, Odysseus speaks to his wife Penelope while disguised as a traveler. He does not reveal himself—not openly, anyway—but, after three hours of movie-watching, he finally opens up about what has kept him from coming home all these years.
I was so struck by this scene that I bought the screenplay when I got home, because I think what Nolan does here is really significant.
PENELOPE How did you make it home, when Odysseus could not?
ODYSSEUS I’m not home. Not yet.
PENELOPE Why not?
ODYSSEUS It’s not always an easy thing, a homecoming. That’s as true for Odysseus as for me.
PENELOPE The Odysseus I knew would’ve found or fought his way back to me no matter what.
ODYSSEUS What if the Odysseus you knew lost his way? What if, one night in a strange city, he saw things that made him think the home he knew couldn’t possibly be there anymore?
Matt Damon’s Odysseus goes on to tell the story of what happened after he led a group of Greek soldiers out of the belly of the Trojan Horse and opened the gates for Agamemnon’s army. He describes it as witnessing “ten years of rage” pouring into the city in one night.
ODYSSEUS We left them a gift. An offering of peace that they took into their home. [Emphasis in original] We violated all that’s ever sacred between people.
“To burn the walls of Troy,” Odysseus concludes, “was to burn the world entire… Including his home.”
It goes without saying that The Odyssey is about home and homecoming. Homer locates home not only in the place of Ithaca, but also in the relationship between Odysseus and Penelope (not unlike Rabbi Yehudah in the first Mishnah of Tractate Yoma: beito zo ishto, ‘his home refers to his wife’). But Nolan brings a contemporary psychological take in his telling: At-homeness is also a state of being. While Odysseus may be physically back in his place and even reunited with his family, he is struggling mightily to be at home with himself—all as a result of his treacherous violation of the ethic of hospitality: “We left them a gift, an offering of peace they took into their home.” Middah k’neged middah, as we might say (or, colloquially, karma): By violating the ethics of home, Odysseus loses his own ability to be at home.
Home is meant to be a peaceful place. That’s why shalom bayit, peace in the home, is such a virtue—because a violent home is anathema. While the word bayit actually doesn’t occur much in the traditional liturgy, the place where its sensibility is most profound is probably in the prayer for peace with which we conclude the Amidah. Notice the things we mention here: “peace, goodness, blessing, favor, kindness and compassion.” We remind ourselves that Torah is about “life and the love of kindliness, righteousness, blessing, compassion, life and peace.” And we conclude the prayer with that same word, shalom—peace, peacefulness, being at home with ourselves, the Holy One, and one another.
The opposite of both peace and home is war, the subject with which Parashat Ki Tetzei opens: “When you go out to war against your enemies” (Deut. 21:10). This continues a section that started in the previous chapter in which we find going to war positioned as the polar opposite of being at home. The officials are instructed to speak to the troops before they enter battle and ask a series of questions: “Is there anyone who has built a new house but has not dedicated it? Is there anyone who has planted a vineyard but has never harvested it? Is there anyone who has betrothed a wife, but who has not yet taken her into his household?” And finally, as a summation, “Is there anyone fearful or fainthearted?” If the answer to any of these questions is “yes,” then the order is, “Let him go back to his home.” You can be on the battlefield, or you can be at home—but you can’t be both.
The Seer of Lublin quotes the Talmud (Sotah 44a): “Is there anyone fearful or fainthearted—this refers to one who is afraid because of the sins they have committed.” From here, the Seer concludes, we can understand that “anyone who went out to war was certain of himself that he had no sin.” After all, self-confidence would seem to be a virtue in an army. And yet, the Seer concludes, such self-confidence carries a significant shadow side: “One who lacks any sensation of sin is liable to stumble at the first opportunity.”
I have not been a soldier—nor, as far as I’m aware, was the Seer of Lublin. So I cannot claim any insight into the experience of ancient soldiers like Odysseus or my own namesake, Joshua, and I will not offer commentary on the soldiers of today. What interests me in this discussion is what, if anything, it can tell us about the condition of being at home—in the literal sense and in a more psychological and spiritual sense as well.
In my view, one important idea is that home is not an idealized, fixed place. In a world of constant change and instability, we might want home to be someplace that never changes. But home does change, as do we. A yearning for an unchanging home is nostalgia—which has its place but is its own form of dodging reality.
Instead, I would offer that at-homeness is a state of mind and spirit in which we can look at ourselves—in the singular and the plural—critically but non-judgmentally. To be at home is to be at peace, which on the most basic level means to feel safe from violence. When we can inhabit such a place physically, mentally, and spiritually, then we actually can engage in discernment, judgment, and healthy conflict. That is a healthy kind of faith, the kind Rabbi Jonathan Sacks described as “like being secure in one’s home, yet moved by the beauty of foreign places, knowing that they are someone else’s home, not mine, but still part of the glory of the world that is ours.”
Sacks wrote those words in the wake of 9/11. A quarter-century later, his conclusion rings true, even if the work seems just as daunting: “Those who are confident in their faith,” what I would call at home with themselves, “are not threatened but enlarged by the different faith of others. In the midst of our multiple insecurities, we need that confidence now.”